1. Related Technical Fields
Related technical fields include driving support methods and driving support apparatuses.
2. Related Art
In-vehicle systems that image the areas which are dead-angles for the driver with an onboard camera and show them on a display have been developed to support safe driving. For example, one such system has been proposed wherein the onboard camera captures an image of the dead-angle area created by a front pillar of the vehicle and the captured images are displayed on the interior side of the front pillar, which is one of two front pillars, one on the left and one on the right, that support the windshield or the roof. The pillars are located diagonally forward from the driver sitting in the driver's seat and block a part of the driver's field of vision. The front pillars must have at least a predetermined size for the sake of safety.
The above-described system, as shown in FIG. 12, includes a camera 100 installed in the vehicle body for imaging an area 106, an image processor that performs image processing on the image signals output from the camera 100, and a projector (not shown in the diagram) that projects the captured images onto the interior side of a front pillar 101. With this system, the driver may visually recognize the outside scene as if seeing through the front pillar 101 from a position 102. Thus, the driver can recognize the road shape or an obstacle to the front and side of the vehicle at an intersection and so forth.
When projecting images captured by the camera 100 onto the pillar 101, the projected image on the pillar 101, unfortunately, tends to tilt or be out of alignment against the scene that the driver is actually viewing through the window, because the viewing angle of the camera 100 and the viewing angle of the driver are not matched. To address the foregoing problem, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-184225 discloses a system which executes a projection conversion of the images captured by the camera using a virtual plane (a surface of a virtual screen) set for the purpose of adjusting to the driver's viewing angle.